Automatic test equipment is commonly used to test devices and components. Many types of automatic test equipment are interfaced with a host computer which controls the test equipment, provides data to the test equipment and/or acquires data from the test equipment. As devices become more complex, an increasing amount of data must be communicated to and from an increasing number of test sites, i.e., devices under test. Therefore, an increasing amount of data must be sent between the test equipment and the host computer.
Automatic testing of digital devices can be very processor-intensive and can typically require one or more high bandwidth channels for communicating between a host computer and test equipment. In some commonly used test equipment, the speed of testing is limited by the bandwidth of this channel and/or the processing capacity of the host computer.
Some test systems employ a separate processor that is permanently connected to each instrument slot. These test systems do not allow the flexibility of changing the interface between processors and instrument slots to allow multiple processors to communicate with a single instrument slot or to assign processors to particular sites, for example. In certain test environments, or when testing certain devices, this type of inflexibility can dramatically limit tester performance. Other systems allow the user to change the assignment of instrument slots to computers, but do not allow multiple computers to talk to one instrument slot.
A large number of expensive testers that were configured using a single processor or multiple processors are in use throughout the world. An existing infrastructure including test instruments and test software has been designed and implemented to run on or in conjunction with these testers.